Mindy Gofton

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The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) of the W3C has finally released the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0, after years of haggling over the initial draft versions.

The WCAG 2.0 Guidelines are meant to help web designers and web developers build websites that are accessible to everybody no matter what device they use to browse the web and no matter what level of skill.

WCAG 2.0 had been contentious from  the start as WAI committee members haggled over the best way to outline their recommendations and define various terms of the document and most people felt that the original draft was unclear and hard to understand - especially as it had a document explaining the guidelines and the a document explaining the document that explained the guidelines - hardly accessible itself.

The discussion got so heated at one stage that reknowned accessibility expert Joe Clark left the group and founded Web Samurai to create a separate set of recommendations to update WCAG 1.0.

We've not had a chance to read through the new document yet, but we will as accessible web design is good practice and helps all users, not just users with disabilities.

We shall no doubt be voicing our thoughts further on the new guidelines in the near future.

Tags: Accessibility, Usability

Discussion

Posted by Mike Gifford on Jan 10th, 2009
How do you reconcile WCAG 2.0's link recommendations:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-WCAG20-TECHS-20080430/C7.html

And google's stated position on hidden links:
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

We\'re discussing this here:
http://groups.drupal.org/node/18081

But certainly encouraged by:
http://labs.google.com/accessible/
Posted by Mindy on Jan 12th, 2009
I don't see how that benefits anybody very much. Isn't the TITLE attribute meant to be used to add additional information to explain the target of a link? This way people can set their screen readers to read or not read it at their own discretion.People will probably disagree very vehemently with me, but I generally believe that if something is useful for one user then it's useful and should be visible. If it's not useful to the point that you have to hide it for most users then you shouldn't have it on the page at all.

If links need additional explanation it's not just people using screen readers that may need that explanation, so why would you hide the text from them?From an SEO perspective you just shouldn't hide the important keywords using CSS at all ever. There should be no reason to do it. Links which point to the same page should have the same link text, links which point to different pages should have different link text and all links should have descriptive link text that gives everybody a clear idea of where the link points.
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